This sixth edition of explaining extreme events of the
previous year (2016) from a climate perspective is the
first of these reports to find that some extreme events
were not possible in a preindustrial climate. The events
were the 2016 record global heat, the heat across Asia,
as well as a marine heat wave off the coast of Alaska.
While these results are novel, they were not unexpected.
Climate attribution scientists have been predicting that
eventually the influence of human-caused climate change
would become sufficiently strong as to push events
beyond the bounds of natural variability alone. It was also
predicted that we would first observe this phenomenon
for heat events where the climate change influence is most
pronounced. Additional retrospective analysis will reveal
if, in fact, these are the first events of their kind or were
simply some of the first to be discovered....

Latest update on the climate science focused on the USA. Content is similar to the IPCC global assessment reports.

"Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume I - This report is an authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States. It represents the first of two volumes of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990."

Clear and very reasonable demands from this NGO to make sure the environment is not forgotten in Brexit negotiations. This includes the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which is important in driving greenhouse gas emission cuts across the EU.

Evidence continues to mount that climate change has pushed the Arctic into a new state. Skyrocketing temperatures are altering the essence of the region, melting ice on land and sea, driving more intense wildfires, altering ocean circulation and dissolving permafrost.

•The Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has most likely been destabilized and ice retreat is unstoppable for the current conditions.
•No further acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with loss of a significant fraction on a decadal to century time scale.
•Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100.
•A large fraction of West Antarctic basin ice could be gone within two centuries, causing a 3–5 metre sea level rise.
•Mechanisms similar to those causing deglaciation in West Antarctica are now also found in East Antarctica.
•Partial deglaciation of the East Antarctic ice sheet is likely for the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, contributing to 10 metres of more of sea level rise in the longer run, and 5 metres in the first 200 years.

Municipalities across Europe increasingly acknowledge the need to adapt to climate change and have begun to adopt various measures. Meeting the costs of adaptation measures for climate change is, however, a major challenge. Municipalities have found innovative ways to overcome that challenge and have started implementing measures. These solutions could be relevant for other cities, towns and smaller municipalities too, and examples are collected and
presented in this publication as an inspiration. It offers insights into lessons learned on the ground regarding the most successful approaches, the difficulties encountered and overcome and the key success factors
in financing local adaptation action.

Anytown: Final Report
A DEFRA funded project - Community Resilience Funding for Local Resilience Forums in England
Matthew Hogan, London Resilience Team

Interdependency is inevitable; you’re only as strong as your weakest dependency. All organisations and even communities directly, should therefore review whether their weak points are internal/external and develop methods to reduce the impact this could have.

The University of Reading has cut its carbon emissions by 35%, producing a saving of £17 million over a five year period.
The University has cut its annual carbon emissions from 44,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2008/09 to just over 28,500 tonnes per year. The total carbon saved over the five year period is 63,000 tonnes, which equates to just over two years' worth of the University's current carbon emissions.

Slowing the Flow at Pickering is exploring a new approach to flood management. It is about working with nature to try and store more water in the landscape and slow its passage downstream. Whilst this will not prevent all flooding, it is expected to reduce the frequency of future floods in Pickering, as well as deliver a range of other benefits to the local environment and community.

The 2015/16 carbon footprint for the Council’s corporate activities is 36.9% lower than the baseline emissions in 2008/09, 5.2% ahead of target, which is significant
progress to meet the 50% reduction target by 2020. The total renewably generated energy in 2015/16 was equivalent to 3.7% of the total energy use of the council, or
5. 9% of energy used in buildings, which continues to move towards the challenging 2020 renewable energy target of 15%.

Story in the Independent:
Climate change escalating so fast it is 'beyond point of no return'
New study rewrites two decades of research and author says we are 'beyond point of no return'
Peter Walker | Thursday 1 December 2016

• To reduce energy use
• To make homes warmer
• To alleviate energy poverty
What we do
Reading Borough Council awarded a grant to Transition Town Reading in 2012 to fund the materials for a DraughtBusting project.

Members of BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG) have agreed on a climate action statement and call to action for the container shipping sector and its value chain to support private-sector contributions for the global goals on climate change.

The International Transport Forum estimates that freight accounts for around 7 percent of global emissions. As of 2011, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) estimated ocean container shipping produced around 219,945,000 tons of climate-related emissions, equivalent to driving 46 million passenger vehicles for a year, and emissions growth was projected to significantly outpace other shipping segments. The CCWG statement was agreed by members as part of a process to tackle these emissions.

A US team of researchers found that forecasted shifts in climate by 2070 would occur too quickly for species of grass to adapt to the new conditions. The species facing an uncertain future include wheat, corn, rice and sorghum, which provide almost half of the calories consumed by humans.

The frequency of floods of the magnitude of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of New York City in 2012, is rising so sharply that they could become relatively normal, with a raft of new research laying bare the enormous upheavals already under way in the US due to climate change.

spearheaded by climate-science guru Dr. James Hansen, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched its own urgent five-year study — a project that will “stress-test” Hansen’s new, and downright dire predictions. The operation titled, “Oceans Melting Greenland” (OMG) will have a budget of $30m to expend on a quest to ascertain even more data on how fast the Arctic is melting — and on just how much the sea level will rise as a result.

With the clock counting down towards the November climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco, where parties to the climate treaty agreed in Paris will negotiate implementation, it’s clear that managing water resources will be a key aspect of any effective deal.

Carbon Capture and Storage technique from Iceland ... but it uses lots of water, and I don't know how much energy ... I also wonder at the scale of this as current global emissions are over 35,000,000,000 tonnes CO2 per year.

This brief quantifies air pollution and climate change externalities related to fossil fuels and the extent
these can be reduced with higher uptake of renewables. For this purpose, the analysis compares global
energy demand between now and 2030 through two cases: first, based on current and planned energy
policies; and second, by doubling the share of renewables in the energy mix within 15 years.
The reduction of pollution and climate impact through rapidly increased use of renewable energy by
2030 could save up to USD 4.2 trillion per year worldwide, 15 times the associated costs of doubling the
share of renewables. Today’s energy markets, however, do not adequately value climate impact or air
pollution. Energy and environmental policies need to correct for these externalities.

The waters surrounding Antarctica may be one of the last places to experience human-driven climate change. New research from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that ocean currents explain why the seawater has stayed at roughly the same temperature while most of the rest of the planet has warmed.

Overall, the nine highest monthly temperature departures in the record have all occurred in the past nine months. March 2016 also marks the 11th consecutive month a monthly global temperature record has been broken, the longest such streak in NOAA's 137 years of record keeping.

There can be no doubt, then, that by the end of this century, life as we know it on planet earth will be very different. Fossil fueled predatory capitalism will be dead. In its place, human civilization will have little choice but to rely on a diversity of clean, renewable energy sources.

Concerns Shared at Environmental Hustings - politicians
agree to tackle climate change but disagree on fracking and local transport.

Over fifty people came to an environmental hustings at Reading Quaker Meeting House on Tuesday 14th April, called by the Greater Reading Environmental Network (GREN).

The political parties were represented by Cllr. Ed Hopper (Conservative), Cllr. Matt Rodda (Labour), Jenny Woods (Liberal Democrat), and Cllr. Rob White (Green). UKIP had been invited but did not send a representative.

The high climate sensitivity of hydrologic systems, the importance of those systems to society, and the imprecise nature of future climate projections all motivate interest in characterizing uncertainty in the hydrologic impacts of climate change. We discuss recent research that exposes important sources of uncertainty that are commonly neglected by the water management community, especially, uncertainties associated with internal climate system variability, and hydrologic modeling. We also discuss research exposing several issues with widely used climate downscaling methods. We propose that progress can be made following parallel paths: first, by explicitly characterizing the uncertainties throughout the modeling process (rather than using an ad hoc “ensemble of opportunity”) and second, by reducing uncertainties through developing criteria for excluding poor methods/models, as well as with targeted research to improve modeling capabilities. We argue that such research to reveal, reduce, and represent uncertainties is essential to establish a defensible range of quantitative hydrologic storylines of climate change impacts.

These are risk assessments have been done for all the Water Management catchments in England. This is an exciting piece of work that I lead on, and captures important information from colleagues across the country.

The focus of this paper is snowmelt and flood peaks in Britain. Most of Britain does not experience sustained periods of lying snow...However, snow is a major component of flow for some catchments, particularly in Scotland...individual snow events can affect flows anywhere in the country: snowmelt was a key factor in the major flooding that occurred across much of England in March 1947

The storm has been a record breaker, with the rain gauge at Honister Pass in the Lake District recording 341.4 mm in the 24 hours up to 1800 GMT on 5 December 2015. The recently released FEH13 rainfall frequency model (Stewart et al, 2013) estimates that this observation has a return period of about 1300 years at this particular location

The 1-hour, 1% AEP (100 year ARI) value has 1% chance of occurring at each of these points in a particular year, which means that there is a good chance (63% assuming full independence of points) of a 1-hour, 1% AEP (100 year ARI) event occurring somewhere in the general Melbourne area in each calendar year. (This is an approximation only as the assumption of independence of - zero correlation amongst - points varies with both the duration of rainfall under consideration and the type of rainfall-producing weather mechanisms which can operate in the area.)

20 Feb 2016 - Winston not only was the first Category 5 tropical cyclone of record to hit Fiji, but earlier Saturday afternoon, became the strongest tropical cyclone of record in the Southern Hemisphere by maximum winds, peaking with 185 mph (nearly 300 km/h) winds estimated by the JTWC

This paper looks at recent trend in global temps. The slow down in warming between 2001 and 2014 prompted useful research improving our understanding of observational biases, decadal variability and uncertainty in key external forcings.

Climate change is likely to have a wide range of impacts on health - some harmful, others potentially beneficial. This LWEC report card summarises the latest scientific evidence and understanding of how climate change may affect the health of the UK population. It has been designed to make it easier to understand the nature of the possible changes and to help inform decisions that will protect our wellbeing.

From the advert...
The event in London will be about making a positive response to the challenges of climate change. Here’s what you can expect:
• Talks by some of the most inspiring people from the climate movement, covering everything from diversifying the climate movement to fracking.
• Amazing value. Full price tickets cost just £6 + booking fee (concessions also available).
• Conversations and workshops with people who want do something to make the situation better for people across the globe.

Dame Julia said it is too early to determine a definitive cause for Storm Desmond, but added that such rainfall is seven times more likely than it would have been in a world without human-created greenhouses gases.